"Gosh, that takes me back... or forward. That's the trouble with time travel, you can never remember."

—The Fourth Doctor, Doctor Who, "The Androids of Tara"

From the publisher:

Temporal Odyssey is a drafting battle card game about dueling time travelers for 2 and 4 players. Draft from the past, present, or future, and enlist legendary heroes and creatures to fight by your side. Group your characters to get them to share their abilities, using this both offensively and defensively. Regroup often to adapt to the situation. Rewind time to prevent your own death but be careful—each time you must suffer judgment from Lovox, the god of time. Destroy your opponent's stability and deliver the final blow to banish them from the timeline and win the game!
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What person has not thought about time travel? The ability to go back in time and alter some of the most tragic events in world history, or maybe something less noble, like have the correct lottery numbers. Either way, various forms of media have covered our fascination on the topic, and now Level 99 games explores the past, present, and the future.

Review:

Rules and Setup:
There are six classes of cards for each time period. Take the six cards associated with three different classes from each time period (past, present, future). Shuffle the classes within the same time periods together to create three decks (Past, Present, and Future). It is recommended that you place the class reminder cards under each time period deck for reference purposes. Add two spells to each time period deck and shuffle them in. Each player may choose your traveler (unless your last name starts with an F like mine, then you have to play as Mr. F) and place them and their tower onto the playing field. Then take the rest of the cards for their traveler into their hand. The second player will receive a token spell named "haste" to be added to their hand, and each player gets four action point (AP) tokens. Take the instability deck and place it next to the play area. Lastly, take all the leftover tokens to the side within reach of all players.

Theme:
Sci-Fi/Fantasy Mechanics:
Card Drafting

Game Play:
At the start of your turn resolve all start turn effects and artifacts in any order. Discard any AP tokens that are on top of cards in your play area. Gain back AP tokens until you have four (unless you have a card stating you have more than four). Place any spells you acquired in the previous round under your traveler.

You will use your AP to perform actions during your turn. You may not place AP on a card more than one time during your turn. You may use your action points for the following:

Enlist a card - Place a card into your play area with the required amount of AP bolt-side up. Only the enlist ability is activated at this time. There is no limit to the number of cards you can have in your play area.

Cast a spell - Place a spell card into your play area with the required number of AP tokens bolt-side up and perform its effects. If you have the proper sigils (symbols) in your play area, you may boost to a level two or three spell gaining not only that power, but all the lower power level effects as well.

Attack - Place one AP token sword side-up onto a previously played card, and then inflict damage equal to the card's attack value to an opponent's leader (note--the leader is the card in the front of the play area, and not necessarily the traveler). When a card has been inflicted equal or greater damage than its HP, it is defeated immediately. Ungroup (I will explain this in a minute) this card and place it in the controller's discard pile. If a traveler is defeated, they will not be discarded, but instead flipped over (on the first defeat) and then given an instability card (three instability cards loses the game). The starting player may not attack the very first turn.

Rest - The traveler may use one AP to return all exhausted spells back into their hand (but may not play the returned spells this turn).

After spending all of your AP (you should, you don't want to leave any AP lying around; you know what they say, "You can't take it with you") you have two final steps in your turn.Regroup - At this time, you may rearrange your characters and structures into groups. Cards that attack this turn MUST be at the front of their group. Characters that were stunned by their opponent's last turn also recover now. A group can have one or two members; the front card (or only card) is the leader. The card behind the leader is support. Spells and AP abilities can target anyone in the group, but only the leader can be attacked. Some cards have a shared defensive ability within groups.

Draft - This is the final phase. You will be choosing three cards from one of the three time periods. With these three cards you will take one and place it back face up on the deck you drew from, place the one to the banish (discard) pile, and take the last card and add to your hand.

Artwork and Components:

The artwork makes me feel like this is already an anime. You have a lot of characters that seem to show their personality and emotions just in the one card. The tokens are a good thickness and the colors chosen for past, present, and future decks are distinctive and do not bleed into each other

The Good:

The number of travelers you can choose from, as well as the number of classes for the initial time period's draw pile, make the replayability of this game very high. The rules are easy to catch on to for a new player, as well as a person familiar with card drafting, player vs. player games.

The Bad:
I wish the characters in the time periods were more defined. I felt some characters' classes did not fit into the periods they were placed in.

Final Thoughts:
This game plays much faster than I thought it would. It's like starting five or ten minutes into a card battle game. We were going for it right from the get-go. This did give it more of that video game feel that I have come to expect from Level 99 Games, and when you get two instability cards, you are in full panic mode. The instability cards having a random bonus on them really help balance out the game.

Players Who Like:
Card drafting, adjusting strategy on the fly, two player battles.

Check out Temporal Odyssey on:

James Freeman - Reviewer

James is a child of the 80's he grew playing D&D and Stratego. He currently owns more games than his understanding wife of 20+ years thinks he should. James lives in Buffalo, New York with his previously mentioned wife, 2 teenage kids and one Havanese dog. Also, if someone outside of Buffalo says they serve buffalo wings, they are lying.